Six months ago, we welcomed a Northamptonshire practice with a list size of over 8,000 patients to the Anima family. We sat down with their lead clinical coder to get his opinion on their new document management workflow, the change management process, and the outcomes the practice has achieved to-date.

Have you seen a measurable return on investment since implementing the new system?

Yes, it has amplified the output of our experienced coders by about 50%, allowing us to process the entire document workload of our surgery (~8000 patients) with only two coders. Training of our reception team to use anima to process more basic documents (A&E letters, 111 reports etc, online pharmacy prescriptions) is ongoing but once they've been trained it is projected to also half the time they spend on document processing.

Has the AI improved productivity or streamlined processes as expected?

Yes, as said before it has improved the output of our clinical coders by about 50%. The process of streamlining tasking, is a little smoother and it has made specific documents, such as blood tests much faster to enter into a patient's record.

Was Anima's implementation support adequate?

The support was more than adequate, at almost any time of the day we had near instant support from a member of the Anima team. In the early days feature requests did come quite slowly but it seems as of recent Anima has been leaning more into them and improving the quality of life of the service.

What specific help and training did they provide? and for how long after you went live?

We received weekly meetings and a variety of training documents. The support is actually still ongoing as we've been rolling into new anima features: Scribe, Autofile, Triage, as we went on. Each time we were given access to a member of the Anima team and ample meeting and training time. If it felt like a meeting wasn't sufficient to train a subsequent meeting was always promptly set up for the following week.

Were there any unexpected expenses during or after implementation?

Unexpected no - but to improve efficiency we did decide to get a 2nd monitor for all admin and reception staff who would be using Anima document processing or triage. It is not an unexpected cost but we felt, given you still need to interact with SystmOne pretty fully even in the Anima environment that two monitors alleviate the cumbersome process of constantly swapping tabs. Otherwise, no anima related costs.

How smooth was the integration with your existing systems and workflows?

Admittedly, pretty bumpy. SystmOne is very archaic and there were some issues with electronic document processing on the onset (partially relieved now by the Anima auto extraction RPA). A large amount of our protocols had to be overhauled for Anima and staff training is still ongoing.

Were there delays or disruptions during the deployment process?

No.

Were there unforeseen challenges?

None really.

What lessons have you learned from implementing this AI software that you wish you’d known earlier?

SystmOne is extremely archaic, you need to get your protocols and handling of documents within the surgery sorted beforehand. Likewise it is crucial to have a set of protocols on how a broad array of letters should be processed (Specific letter typing, coding etc) and understanding of how you'd like to handle QOF and patient summaries when it comes to adding QOF based tags from Anima to S1 to avoid miscommunication between staff.

Would you recommend this AI solution to other GP practices?

Yes.